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Comment by newdude116 | Hacker News Reader

Looks interesting but mainly about history.

BTW, One lie the Americans are told in High Scholl is that the US won the 2nd World war https://youtu.be/DwKPFT-RioU?t=245

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This is not so much a lie as an over-simplification. Anyone suggesting that the US did not play a major role in WW2 is foolish.

I'm sure that as a thought exercise, someone could identify a number of different events or courses of action in WW2 which could have in principle changed the outcome of the war. In that sense, there are many things which "won" WWII.

Further, number of casualties is a perfectly fine argument for "who sacrificed the most," but not necessarily for who "won" the war.

> Further, number of casualties is a perfectly fine argument for "who sacrificed the most," but not necessarily for who "won" the war.

Exactly. It's possible to have that many casualties and then lose the war. All those casualty numbers tell us is that the war on the Eastern front was far more brutal than the war on the Western front, not how strategically important the victory on either front ended up being.

Normandy in 44? The war was lost since many years then.

The Soviet Union may have won against Japan too :-) https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...

> is that the US won the 2nd World war

Without US manufacturing capacity things would have gone differently.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

Khrushchev:

> "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs.[1] "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."

* [1] http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/khruschev1/28.html

* https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balanc...

Apparently something like one-third of the tanks during the Battle of Moscow were British:

* https://doi.org/10.1080/13518040903355794

It's equally wrong to say that the USSR won the war as it is to say the US did, but the USSR unquestionably paid the highest price to ensure the Allies won.

When a group works well together you can't find any single winner when they succeed. Russia and the rest barely worked together at all, but still worked together well enough that you cannot find a single winner.

While the Soviet Union had 20-27M deaths in WWII, the most of any country:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

'Only' about half of those were in Russia itself. Breaking things out by Soviet 'provinces', which are now independent countries: Belarus had 2.3M and Ukraine had 6.9M.

Absolute numbers also don't tell the whole story: 25% of Belarus' population was killed, while 'only' 12.7% of Russia's was. Ukraine, 16.3%; Latvia, 13.7%; Armenia, 13.7%; Poland, 17%.

While it's worth noting the individuals nationalities of those that died, you can compare any one of them to the US's .32% of the population killed to see the point I am making.

Yep the US was an important arms dealer, getting rich selling weapons to Europeans. No argument there. It also helped defeating what remained of the Nazi soldiers after millions had already been killed by Europeans and Russians. Also no argument there. However going from there to say that the US won the war is unbelievably disrespectful to the millions of people who died fighting the Nazis for years before the US finally decided to play an active role.

It’s part of the myth Americans teach each other. All countries have their myths and the myths are always constructed to make people feel good about themselves or to make people feel good about how much better they are today. America functioned mostly as an arms dealer during the 2nd world war, getting rich in gold selling weapons to Europe, financing a huge boom in manufacturing that made the US #1 in the world for many years following the 2nd WW. It is absolutely true that the US played a major role in the allied winning the war. But not the way it is told in movies/stories. The majority of Americans, for many years, wanted to do nothing helping Europeans. While millions of Europeans were fighting the Nazis, giving their lives to defend their homes.

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other [guy] die for his." - G.S. Patton

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